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After presentations, and reflections this morning, we’ll be working together in informal group sessions to respond to the following discussion, reflection, and action items. The hope is to leave THATCamp and CAA with something to build on, both digitally and through the new, collegial bonds formed from face-to-face interaction.

The Google Doc is here and can be added to by anyone at the session–or following along via Twitter or elsewhere. Please participate!

CAA THATCamp Reflection Session – Feb 13, 2014

Discussion Point:
What are the most pressing issues and/or opportunities for you in the field today—digital, or otherwise? Is it tenure, publishing, sharing your ideas, adjunctification…..

Reflection Point:
How/does the digital offer an opportunity to move forward/press/rethink this issue?

Action Point:
What can you do? What can CAA do? What kinds of panels might you want to see/help facilitate at THATCamp or CAA in the future?

Becky Huff Hunter introduced the session with some questions: What are some examples of alternative/experimental forms of art writing on the web? Have attendees been involved in web-based writing? What’s the impact of new forms of writing on artistic, curatorial, and scholarly practice?

Charlotte Frost gave us a sneak peek into her forthcoming book—a history of web-based art writing that includes websites, bulletins, mailing lists, blogs, and social media—with the following examples (in chronological order from sometime in the ’90s to the present:

Dewitt Godfrey, CAA President Elect, commented that he wants to engage the ways in which artists and scholars work online, in order to better serve the CAA community. CAA has an online journal, but what else could be offered?

Hussein Keshani spoke about:Archnet—designed to bring together Islamic world architects and scholars: threads where people discuss things like “how does one define Islamic architecture?”; visual database, image archive detached from text streams; scholarly articles, also disconnected from current text streams and image database; problem maintaining the quality of the conversation.

And my notes get a bit more rushed here as the conversation was really flowing…

Media Arts. Curating. List
– networked discussion about the stuff in Charlotte’s book
– arts future book – how the humanities and theory will happen in the future – mailing list component to that project
– fraught success of the mailing lists, lots of archives mentioned that she hadn’t heard of
– Media art histories conference, people messaged her outside of the

– conversations – mailing list replaced with comments on Facebook pages of famous art historians / writers – no one person can own the space – list based intervention – how to have a productive conversation in those spaces – juggling all different information from different platforms, things coming off list but need to share it on list – personal emotions get woven into the list, example of friend passing away

– lists are by definition serial and sequential – not a discussion format
– “epistolary discussion”

– these are all different platforms with different affordances

– we have to re-educate ourselves about how to use different platforms

– why a book – Charlotte set up a project to play around with what an art knowledge object might be. This was for the authors involved in the project, so that they can have something published and peer reviewed. The book was for other people, not so important to Charlotte. She uses herself as a guinea pig.

– fine line in the sand is peer review – this doesn’t acknowledge the way in which peer review has changed
– blog = peer review after being published and the problem is that attention becomes an authority
– another form of peer review is comment press (WordPress add on) – you dump in an entire text then it gets broken up into posts which people can comment on. Public peer review – sometimes by invitation and then sometimes not – Katherine Fitzpatrick “planned obscelence”

– isobel streffer and siofar mcsheerry – andorproject.com
– problem – maintaining quality of the space – curated space vs interactivity
– problem of getting this accepted by their institutions, seeing online practice as a side project in order for it to go with tenure
– this mirrors the language of fine arts peer review tenure 30 years ago – vetting galleries, now we’ll be vetting websites, trying to understand the legitimacy of one thing over another – a peer review after evaluation

– structures
– Charlotte just fell into making a book, this is the structure of the academy
– we don’t have structures that are consistent enough or visible enough to fit

– triple canopy – corrected slogans, recorded the panels, then annotated them – memorialized into a book – triple canopy very enamoured with their own structure – what we are able to do on the web influenced

2004, live critical project with furtherfield _ virtual artists residencies. – public could log in and akss the the artists questions – using a bespoke chat box – so fast, difficult to keep up – complete meltdown of whether we’d said anything of use or value – same with twitter chats now, storify now useful for grabbing editing creating something

– is there a different approach to using these online tools, or are we using them in the same way as anyone else?
– visual arts – images, projects where you want to connect the words to an image
– orandproject.com – residency put together – artists/art historians not talking to each other – even meeting online, level playing field discussion forum

– Terra foundation residency in France – apply for this

– boundaries between disciplines – images are specific to the arts, experimentation is encouraged in the arts

– DH is “just Internet art from 1995”

2010 – Michael Mandlberg collaboratively wrote a book Collaborative Futures (on bookie) – eg, as artists we’re used to experimenting, tradition of being encouraged to break things and to work against the grain – the avant garde role or the irreverent role of the artist.

art is always self published – this is what practice is – many more art historians are know independent scholars – what shift in assumptions can CAA work with in order to help people – the art world / art history world is no longer stable, so how to participate – scholars are now like artists – the rapidly expanding field of online discourse and the

What are we going to do about copyrighted images of contemporary art?
Amy Ballmer on CUNY: we need legal help; librarians and VR professionals are not always copyright experts
Copy Fraud – Christine Sundt mentioned as a great resource for copyright info; doesn’t apply to contemporary art but still relevant; issues is more about contracts and not copyright – most scholarly use is covered under the law, it’s the permissions culture that is getting in the way
Fair Use best practices by Christine Sundt: darkwing.uoregon.edu/~csundt/copyweb/bestpractices.htm
Mentioning both CAA copyright best practices: www.collegeart.org/news/2014/01/29/caa-publishes-fair-use-issues-report/
and VRA copyright best practices: www.vraweb.org/organization/pdf/VRAFairUseGuidelinesFinal.pdf
-One of the main points being that if you’re using images in teaching you can use them
-As far as dissertations are concerned, it is an academic requirement and not a publication, so image use should be considered under fair use
Against Intellectual Monopoly, a book on controlled and managed intellectual property
How much of this is self-censorship? How much are academics and librarians simply afraid of litigation?
Volunteer Lawyers for the Creative Arts: www.vlany.org/

The full outline for Lev’s talk, which is being given simultaneously (and for a longer 1.5 hr session) at the Graduate Center, CUNY in New York, is here. Use this webpage to supplement the onscreen/on air discussion.

caa2014.thatcamp.org/2014/02/11/note-from-the-pedagogy-breakout-creating-non-linear-textbooks/
changing the “textbook” from chronological to something else: thematic (like “communication”), then use a crowdsourced materials (“why do we look at old things”) to create a customized syllabus. no need to reinvent the wheel.
learning outcomes//teaching outcomes (partnership opportunities)
what is it to teach thematically?
finding the right tools for the job//teaching portal
do we focus too much on finding the right tool instead of creating the right content?
wiki model//sustainability//editorship
resources as a forum/community
google+/hangout for a community of peers
what value is a community? (teaching outside your area, first time teaching, responding to new groups of students, new teaching methods – expanding the dialogue)
how do we keep art history separate from other disciplines? (do we need to?)
team teaching/interdisciplinary methodology
falling enrollment rates
changing the language of classes: syllabi changing, class titles changing
k-12/common core changing
ideal resource forum: what would it stress? a skill based model (why learn art history) or thematic (art history itself)
end of session: creating a google+ community – plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112121309526258693821
see also: plus.google.com/u/0/109713576014955162590/posts
links:arthistoryteachingresources.org // omeka.org/.net // narrativemedicine.org //

I’d like to propose a General Discussion/Working Session hybrid about the D. James Dee Photo Archive, approx. 250,000 transparencies, slides, and negatives documenting contemporary art in NYC (particularly Soho galleries) from the late 1970s – present. Artstor acquired the archive this summer and is in the process of figuring out how to digitize it and, more importantly, catalog it. The collection isn’t cataloged and the slides aren’t labeled so any effort to effectively describe it will be a collective effort. I’m curious to hear what people think about crowd sourcing, tagging, and any other ideas. The BBC’s Your Paintings project is one example of a successful tagging project but what about extensive crowd sourced cataloging, how much metadata is needed before images are released, is it best to open the cataloging to everyone or a select group?

Dutch company, Picturae — best known for mass digitization, but also software development

A common theme as people introduce themselves is wanting to get *good* tags in addition to tags at all — possibly using controlled vocabularies.

Ian asks whether people do know of available tools to use — there are problems with using vendors, and there are other problems with “rolling your own” platform. One participant records Artsy’s experience using Mechanical Turk: it took a developer a couple hours to sync the database with Amazon’s, and thereafter it cost about 1 cent per image even with having about 5 people tag each one. Concerns, though, with labor ethics and with image rights.

The Carnegie Mellon program had a Teeny Harris program to get people to identify who’s in the photo.

John Resig brings up a case where a lot of crowdsourced work that had happened over the course of years was replaced in an afternoon by an advanced “computer vision” technique that helped identify things in photos. General point: before you turn to crowdsourcing, talk to advanced computer scientists to make sure that there’s not a computational technique.

Participant wonders what information would be most needed: gallery, creator, year, people, etcetera.

Amanda brings up LibraryThing’s Legacy Libraries and suggests having a “barn-raising” — an event to engage the community as well as to get some items tagged or cataloged. Ian agrees it can be a terrific jumpstart in particular. Participant raises the issue of how you reach people who “aren’t on the Internet all the time.” John Resig also raises a concern about just expecting people to do all the work: important to “chunk” the work so that it’s doable. At the same time, there are many people who do care passionately about particular items or topics. Participant raises the topic of errors in crowdsourcing: Ian mentions that many projects will only accept data once it has been verified by multiple people. Participant brings up the example of the Steve.Museum, where the curation had to happen after all the tagging. John Resig talks about how often it takes thousands of cases in order to train computer software, so unless your set has thousands and thousands of items, in some cases you might as well just do the work manually yourself, or crowdsource it.

Participant brings up search by image — how does it work? John is going to talk about some of that in the next session.